Es war einmal …istanti infiniti…

Following the great success of the first CD “Lichtblick – prima, altrove …” by Markus Stockhausen, Angelo Comisso and Christian Thomé, the trio presents here its second album.

There was but one piece at the beginning, “Strahlenspur“, recorded in 1983 with Rainer Brüninghaus at the piano and the drummer Fredy Studer. And there was this young man playing the trumpet in a way the world had never heard before, with a clear sound of an other-worldly beauty and an understanding of music that effortlessly moved beyond the boundaries of the formats of avantgarde, contemporary sound design and improvisation. Markus Stockhausen would tell me later that this had been a stroke of luck of mutual inspiration. The path had been set, onward and up with gentle consistency. More than 2 decades later Markus Stockhausen has again reached a point that promises freedom. He has reformed the trio in the same lineup as before and it gives him wings, carries him. He has now reached a degree of reflection, a musical maturity which connects intuition and control, personality and perfection on one level, resulting in a musical balance in which you can still get a feel of the fights it took to get there, as well as the strength that seems to flow from the sounds themselves. And it’s still all about the aesthetics of sounds, their appeal, the connection of imagination and expression, and on a different level even the disappearance of the compositional without structural loss. It’s about a communality that generates art, the organic within the artificial. The music of the Trio Stockhausen, Comisso and Thomé therefore has a somewhat heraclitic touch. It narrates, natters, argues and discusses, with all the participants communicating lively, while it simultaneously follows the steady flow of the impressions that gently but decidedly carry the artists forward. There are moments when you feel the music lingering in one place, moments of quiet, there is introversion just as well as mischievousness, there is even something redundant, which only strengthens the contrast to other more compact elements. But most of all there is that ever stronger moment of being able to let go on the solid basis of said communality. And so the circle is complete. What started as a stroke of luck with “Strahlenspur”, has now matured into a musical language that yet has to find its like in the area of improvisation, of “comprovisation”. Ralf Dombrowski